How we create high-performance marketing capability for industrial businesses

Strategy before Implementation

(and Diagnosis before Strategy)

Marketing is much more than just a bunch of tactical activities that you implement when you realise something is out of date, needs fixing or when sales are down and require a boost.

It's especially easy for businesses who don't have an embedded marketing process (or dedicated marketing resource) to default to this type of approach. They don't “do marketing" all the time, but only when there's an urgent need.

Strategy should always precede the implementation of Tactics.

‘Strategy' gets kicked around a lot in marketing, but in essence it consists of three straightforward steps:

• targeting - who is the focus of your strategy?
• positioning - how are you aligning yourself to the target's needs?
• objectives - what are you going to achieve, in what timeframe?

When you can define any strategy in such a simple, actionable and measurable way, there's no excuse to not spend the time required to do this prior to leaping into tactical implementation.

And the way you set effective strategy, is by founding it on relevant insights - not assumptions and bias.

This is where Diagnosis comes in.

Diagnosis similarly isn't something you do only “when you have the time". Nor does it need to be a big research task. You should dedicate at least a small amount of time prior to setting any strategy, to review and diagnose the situation.

In doing so, you analyse in a bit more depth the given situation - be it a single marketing activity, a whole marketing channel or the entire business. And inevitably you better understand:

• the current problem/challenge
• the future state you want to reach
• the benefits this will provide

In summary, the fastest way to greater marketing success is this three-step approach:

1. Diagnosis
2. Strategy
3. Tactics

We build the Foundations first

Marketing is also more successful when you get the foundations right first, just as you would when constructing a building. In marketing, this involves a well-defined plan, key messaging, core assets, and the systems to deliver marketing effectively.

Only then can you implement an effective, sustainable marketing strategy. And have the structure and capability needed to scale as the business grows.

Here's an idea of the phases we work through as our involvement with a given business progresses.

Foundations

We start by preparing a business for sustainable growth. We audit and optimise existing marketing assets, updating the positioning and key messaging where needed. We identify resource gaps and assemble a suite of marketing technology to ensure any plan can be effectively executed. It's a balanced approach that establishes a strong marketing foundation, whilst enabling us to more quickly deliver wins for your business.

Growth

Scale

Balancing the short and the long

The final piece of our approach is helping businesses ‘look up'; to not be solely focussed on short-term initiatives and business drivers (3-12 months), but also to spend time and resources on longer-term brand building and business growth (2-3 years).

It is all too easy for your business's marketing efforts to be consumed by short-term, urgent needs such as quarterly or monthly sales targets, negative anecdotal customer feedback, and plenty more.

But an abundance of research and commentary on this topic shows that a balanced approach to marketing on both short-term sales driven activities and long-term brand building efforts leads to the highest gains.

It's not a one-size-fits-all approach, but we help businesses determine what is an appropriate mix for their business to be balanced and performing at their best.